Enjoy Your Trip

January 8, 2012

Back in 2007, my Nana passed away. My mom and my Nana had been practically best friends for my mom’s entire life; My grandparents used to leave my mom at Nana’s house when they went on vacation, so they both saw a lot of each other.

They all lived in England, until my mom moved over to the United States in 1989. She kept in touch with everyone. She would call her mom every Saturday and Nana every Sunday. My mom and Nana had a plan devised in which my mom would call her one Sunday, and then Nana would call the next, and then mom, and then Nana. I think it had something to do with phone bills, but I was pretty young so I’m not sure. They would always call each other when it was exactly 8 in the morning over here, but because Nana’s clock was slightly off she always called at exactly 8:04. Because she was calling from a different country, the caller I.D. would always come up as “UNKNOWN CALLER”. (Don’t worry, all of this information is relevant!)

So again, in 2007 my Nana passed away, on a Tuesday to be exact. My mom and I stayed home and cried most of the week, and we made plans to fly over to England for the funeral the following week. But for that first week we were staying at home, and on the following Sunday morning as we were eating breakfast my mom looked over at the clock and noticed it was 8:02. She started tearing up and said that last time she had talked to Nana, they had planned that Nana would be the one to call, and if she hadn’t passed she would be calling in exactly 2 minutes. My mom and I were pretty teary again until at exactly 8:04, I shit you not, the phone rings. We look up at each other and I think it’s safe to say I’ve never seen a more dumbfounded and terrified expression on my mother’s face. She took the phone off its stand and pointed at the caller I.D. It said, “UNKNOWN CALLER”. Now, at this point, I could feel my stomach dropping into my buttcheeks in horror, so I tried to rationalize it by saying, “Maybe it’s just a telemarketer”, but my mom shook her head and answered the phone. I could faintly hear it; It was just static and noise for several minutes. Then, it said something, and I heard it “click” meaning the caller had hung up. I asked my mom what was going on and she said it sounded like one of those scam calls you get saying that you’ve won a trip to the Bahamas or something, only she couldn’t make out anything that it was saying up until the last bit, when it just said, “Enjoy your trip to paradise!” in a very cheery, female voice and then hung up.

Since that incident, a few other inexplicable things have happened involving my Nana. While my mom and I were in England for the funeral, my dad called and said that a book had been left on the top of the stairs. It was a children’s book I hadn’t read in years and it had been kept on my bookshelf for the best part of a decade. But somehow, it had ended up lying open at the top of the stairs, and it was a book my Nana gave to me.

There's a possibility all of these stories are the result of drugs, mental illness, physical illness, stress, sleep paralysis, dreams, or natural phenomena misidentified. That all of these stories are the result of the story teller lying or exaggerating.
But out of all the hundreds of stories here there is also the very real possibility that perhaps one is the absolute truth, that one has no other possible explanation other than the supernatural.
The question is, which story is it and what would that suggest about the universe.